IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA (original) (raw)

This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institu-tionalise 'national memory' in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective 'national' memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (ÚPN, The Nation's Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (ÚSTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slo-vaks.